ABSTRACT
Evidence investigating skilled performers in sport suggests that a prominent component of skilled behavior is, in part, due to the development of more effective and efficient perception-action couplings. Further, the Quiet Eye has emerged as a useful tool in which to investigate how skilled performers regulate action through fixating on visual information within the immediate environment before the onset of a goal directed movement. However, only a few contributions to the literature have attempted to examine the individual variations within these Quiet Eye fixations in skilled participants. In this case study, we first asked how goalkeepers control their actions, via the Quiet Eye in a representative task. Second, we sought to examine whether inter- and intra- individual differences in the Quiet Eye are present in skilled goalkeepers as a functional component of skilled performance. Results were consistent with previous work on football goalkeepers, with QE fixations located at the ball and visual pivot. However, individual analysis reveals different Quiet Eye gaze patterning between (inter) and within (intra) the goalkeepers during saving actions. To conclude, we have provided a descriptive case study in attempt to understand the Quiet Eye behaviors of a skilled sample of professional goalkeepers. In doing so we have suggested how adaptive variability, founded upon an Ecological Dynamics framework, may provide further insight into the function of the Quiet Eye.
ABSTRACT
The recent upsurge in "brain training and perceptual-cognitive training," proposing to improve isolated processes, such as brain function, visual perception, and decision-making, has created significant interest in elite sports practitioners, seeking to create an "edge" for athletes. The claims of these related "performance-enhancing industries" can be considered together as part of a process training approach proposing enhanced cognitive and perceptual skills and brain capacity to support performance in everyday life activities, including sport. For example, the "process training industry" promotes the idea that playing games not only makes you a better player but also makes you smarter, more alert, and a faster learner. In this position paper, we critically evaluate the effectiveness of both types of process training programmes in generalizing transfer to sport performance. These issues are addressed in three stages. First, we evaluate empirical evidence in support of perceptual-cognitive process training and its application to enhancing sport performance. Second, we critically review putative modularized mechanisms underpinning this kind of training, addressing limitations and subsequent problems. Specifically, we consider merits of this highly specific form of training, which focuses on training of isolated processes such as cognitive processes (attention, memory, thinking) and visual perception processes, separately from performance behaviors and actions. We conclude that these approaches may, at best, provide some "general transfer" of underlying processes to specific sport environments, but lack "specificity of transfer" to contextualize actual performance behaviors. A major weakness of process training methods is their focus on enhancing the performance in body "modules" (e.g., eye, brain, memory, anticipatory sub-systems). What is lacking is evidence on how these isolated components are modified and subsequently interact with other process "modules," which are considered to underlie sport performance. Finally, we propose how an ecological dynamics approach, aligned with an embodied framework of cognition undermines the rationale that modularized processes can enhance performance in competitive sport. An ecological dynamics perspective proposes that the body is a complex adaptive system, interacting with performance environments in a functionally integrated manner, emphasizing that the inter-relation between motor processes, cognitive and perceptual functions, and the constraints of a sport task is best understood at the performer-environment scale of analysis.
